had before, subtlety that surpassed any machine and patience that surpassed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams—but they had achieved it.
Watching Silipan pontificate, Pham realized that the next stage in his plan had finally arrived. The low-level Emergents had accepted Pham Trinli. Nau tolerated, even humored him, thinking he might be an unknowing window on the Qeng Ho military mind. It was time to learn a lot more about Focus. Learn from Silipan, from Reynolt… someday learn the technical side of the thing.
Pham had tried to build a true civilization across all of Human Space. For a few brief centuries it had seemed he might succeed. In the end, he had been betrayed. But Pham had long ago realized that the betrayal had been just the overt failure. What Sura and the others did to him at Brisgo Gap had been inevitable. An interstellar empire covers so much space, so much time. The goodness and justice of such a thing is not enough. You need an edge.
Pham Nuwen raised his bulb of Diamonds and Ice and drank an unnoticed toast, to the lessons of the past and the promise of the future. This time he would do things right.
EIGHTEEN
Ezr Vinh’s first two years after the ambush were spread across nearly eight years of objective time. Almost like a good Qeng Ho captain, Tomas Nau was pacing their duty time to match local developments. Qiwi and her crews were out of coldsleep more than any, but even they were slowing down.
Anne Reynolt kept her astrophysicists busy, too. OnOff continued to settle along the light curve that had been seen in previous centuries; to a lay observer, it looked like a normal, hydrogen-eating sun, complete with sunspots. At first, she held the other academics to a lower duty cycle, awaiting the resumption of Spider activity.
Military radio transmissions were heard from Arachna less than one day after the Relight, even while steam-storms churned the surface. Apparently, the Off phase of the sun had interrupted some local war. Within a year or two, there were dozens of transmission sites on two continents. Every two centuries these creatures had to rebuild their surface structures almost from the foundations up, but apparently they were very good at it. When gaps showed in the cloud cover, the spacers caught sight of new roads, towns.
By the fourth year there were two thousand transmission points, the classical fixed-station model. Now Trixia Bonsol and the other linguists went to a heavier duty cycle. For the first time they had continuous audio to study.
When their Watches matched—and they often did now—Ezr visited Trixia Bonsol every day. At first, Trixia was more remote than ever. She didn’t seem to hear him; the Spider talk flooded her workroom. The sounds were a squeaking shrillness that changed from day to day as Trixia and the other Focused linguists determined where in the acoustic spectrum the sense of Spider talk was hidden, and devised convenient representations, both auditory and visual, for its study. Eventually, Trixia had a usable data representation.
And then the translations really began. Reynolt’s Focused translators grabbed everything they could get, producing thousands of words of semi-intelligible text per day. Trixia was the best. That was obvious from the beginning. It was her work with the physics texts that had been the original breakthrough, and it was she who melded that written language with the language spoken in two-thirds of the radio broadcasts. Even compared to the Qeng Ho linguists, Trixia Bonsol excelled; how proud she would be if only she could know. “She’s indispensable.” Reynolt passed sentence with her typical flat affect, free of both praise and sadism, a statement of fact. Trixia Bonsol would get no early out, as Hunte Wen had.
Vinh tried to read everything the translators produced. At first it was typical of raw field linguistics, where each sentence consisted of dozens of pointers to alternative meanings, alternative parsings. After a few Msecs, the translations were almost readable. There were living beings down there on Arachna, and these were their words.
Some of the Focused linguists never got beyond the annotated-style translations. They were caught in the lower levels of meaning and fought any attempt to capture the spirit of the aliens. Maybe that was enough. For one thing, they learned that the Spiders had no knowledge of any previous civilization:
“We’re seeing no mention of a golden age of technology.”
Nau looked at Reynolt skeptically. “That’s suspicious in itself. Even on Old Earth, there were at least myths of a lost past.” And if ever there were an origin world, it was Old Earth.
Reynolt shrugged. “I’m telling you that any mention of past technical civilizations is below the plausible background level. For instance, as far as we can tell, archeology is considered an insignificant academic pursuit”— not the world-creating frenzy of the typical fallen colony.
“Well, Plague take it,” said Ritser Brughel. “If there’s nothing for these guys to dig up, our payoff is just about crap.”
Pity you didn’t think of that before you came,thought Ezr.
Nau looked sour and surprised, but he disagreed with Brughel:
“We’ve still got Dr. Li’s results.” His glance flickered across the Qeng Ho at the foot of the table, and Ezr was sure that something else passed through the Emergent’s mind:We’ve still got a Qeng Ho fleet library, andPeddlers to explore it for us.
Trixia let Ezr touch her now, sometimes to comb her hair, sometimes just to pat her shoulder. Maybe he had spent so much time in her workroom that she thought of him as a piece of furniture, as safe as any other voice- activated machine. Trixia normally worked with a head-up display now; sometimes that gave the comforting illusion that she was actually looking at him. She would even answer his questions, as long as they stayed within the scope of her Focus and did not interrupt her conversations with her equipment and the other translators.
Much of the time, Trixia sat in the semidarkness, listening and speaking her translations at the same time. Several of the translators worked in that mode, scarcely more than automatons. Trixia was different, Vinh liked to think: like the others, she analyzed and reanalyzed, but not to insert a dozen extra interpretations beneath every syntactic structure. Trixia’s translations seemed to reach for the meaning as it was in the minds of the speakers, in minds for which the Spider world was a normal, familiar place. Trixia Bonsol’s translations were… art.
Art was not what Anne Reynolt was looking for. At first she had only little things to complain about. The translators chose an alternative orthography for their output; they represented thex ? andq ? glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn’t the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty.
One terrible day, Reynolt threatened to bar Ezr from Trixia’s workroom—that is, from Trixia’s life. “Whatever you’re doing, Vinh, it’s messing her up. She’s giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: ‘Sherkaner Underhill,’ ‘Jaybert Landers.’ She’s throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she’s making up nonsense syllables.”
“She’s doing just what she should be doing, Reynolt. You’ve been working with automatons too long.” One thing about Reynolt: Though she was crass even by Emergent standards, she never seemed vindictive. She could even be argued with. But if she barred him from seeing Trixia…
Reynolt stared at him for a moment. “You’re no linguist.”
“I’m Qeng Ho. To make our way, we’ve had to understand the heart of thousands of human cultures, and a couple of nonhuman ones. You people have mucked around this small end of Human Space, with languages based on our broadcasts. There are languages that are enormously different.”
“Yes. That’s why her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable.”
“No! You need people who truly understand the other side’s minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens’ differences. So Trixia’s Spider names look silly. But this ‘Accord’ group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language.”
“Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk merges given names and surnames, that interphonation trick.”
“I’m telling you, what Trixia is doing is fine. I’ll bet the given names are from older and related languages.
